The movie blurb was a decade old, but that didn't stop it from going viral when it was rediscovered by Jay Leno, then posted on Reddit, then shared by George Takei on Facebook.

"The Wizard of Oz (8-10 p.m., TCM) -- Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again."

The only problem was the way the old newspaper clipping was cropped. The credit reads, "Inquirer Television Writer Lee Winfrey" and leaves off a contributor credit to Rick Polito, now a Boulder-based freelance writer and then a syndicated columnist based with the Marin Independent Journal in California.

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Polito has been trying to set the record straight and turn the newfound popularity of his movie listings -- Takei has posted a few others and he has more than 15,000 of them on his computer -- into a paying gig.

"It's frustrating having my joke out there with someone else's name on it," Polito said. "For every person who's seen it with my name on it, 10 other people have seen it with someone else's name."

Polito worked for the Marin County newspaper for 17 years and started doing the joke movie blurbs when he helped the copy editors put together the television listings.

"I think in one-liners," he said. "It's a disorder."

Polito gathered a big local following and eventually it turned into a regular column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.

"People felt like they were in on the joke," he said. " 'Oh, they must have got that one by the editor.' But really, it was on purpose."

Polito thought he had joined an elite club, those who wrote humor for a living. But not enough newspapers picked up the column, and Universal Press dropped him.

"I'd hear from editors that, 'We think it's hilarious, but we don't know what to do with it,'" he said.

Polito eventually left journalism and moved to Boulder with his then-wife and their two children in 2007. He became a stay-at-home father, but lost that role in his divorce.

Since then, he's been trying to revive a comedy writing career and trying his hand at other gigs, including developing a storytelling app called Shake-N-Tell that generates story starters for parents.

Polito hopes the popularity of his Wizard of Oz description will help him get a regular writing job or maybe a book deal, but he needs people to know that he, and not Winfrey, wrote the blurb.

Takei, the actor who played Sulu in the original "Star Trek" who is now a well known Internet personality, was quick to correct the record and credit Polito, but the nature of the Internet is that viral images keep getting shared. Comedian Jack Black recently posted the Oz blurb, still cropped to exclude Polito's name. Polito is trying to get in touch with Black to correct the attribution.

"It's a quest to get the proper attribution, which is in part to see if it can turn into income for a starving journalist," Polito said. "I'm proud of that joke."

Boulder resident Rick Polito in his home, before a projected copy of one of his humorous movie listings. More than a decade later, his description of the "Wizard of Oz" went viral, but was cropped in such a way that another writer received credit.
(CLIFF GRASSMICK)

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